2 Comments

David James Vickery
on November 16, 2016 at 3:22 am

Thanks Scott; I hope work on your book is going well!

Luther Blissett
on November 16, 2016 at 3:01 pm

Andrew Cockburn: “When [Trump] is up against the McCains and the Boltons and the Gullianas and… who’s that other fellow… um god I can’t remember his name, former head of the CIA, another nut-case he’s think about putting on….”

The name you are looking for is Robert James Woolsey, who was Director of the CIA (1993-5), he was also hired by Paul Nitze for the SALT 1 negotiating team, Reagan’s ‘Delegate at Large’ to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) & Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST), and Bush Sr’s Ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.

Woolsey is also a techno-militarist who mid-wived the Predator drone program, specializes in spy satellites and is now warning about EMPs as the new WMDs. He life’s goal has been to maintain and enlarge military budgets (which he and his wife both personally profit from).

He is also, as noted, a hardcore neo-con “nut-case” and Trump’s ‘senior national security adviser’.

Surely Cockburn remembers Woolsey, he wrote a glowing article about him entitled ‘The Radicalization of James Woolsey’ (New York Times Magazine, July 23, 2000) where Woolsey’s attempts to free some of Chalabi’s creepy compatriots from the INS is portrayed as sort of ‘Road to Damascus’ where nice guy Woolsey realizes their is a evil ‘deep state’ in America.

My favorite lines from that article: “Woolsey called me in a white-hot fury to report what had happened. He was prepared to believe that the authorities, motivated by spite over defense successes in publicizing the case, had actually been complicit in the attack. “God,” he suddenly growled, “this is such a fascist country.”

This would be wonderfully ironic if it wasn’t just a cover story for more neo-con covert shenanigans. Apparently among Woolsey’s spookier powers is the ability to cloud men’s minds.